Hardcover(1st Edition)
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Overview
A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.A story of love and loss, and the evolution of farm life as the 20th century unfolded, narrated by a feisty farm woman as she reflects on her life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781882593217 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bridgeworks |
| Publication date: | 03/25/1998 |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 245 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.84(w) x 8.48(h) x 0.99(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter Two
THE NEXT MORNING WHEN FATHER rapped on my door I was not sure whether the muffled voices I had heard the night before, rising and falling somewhere deep in the house, had been in my dream, but I believe now they were not, and that I did hear my mother softly crying. When I came downstairs about an hour before daybreak, a banquet of aromas drew me into the kitchen. Sausage and potatoes, eggs and coffee and toast with apple butter lay ready on the table. Mother had prepared a full breakfast for us though she did not speak a word till we slipped out the screen door.
"Don't slam it," she said quietly, partly out of habit and partly because a sharp noise would have destroyed the peace of dawn like the shot of a gun.
Early-morning stars peeked through the charcoal sky. The roosters throughout the valley roused each other and all around us songbirds stirred. We headed a quarter of a mile up Pike Road. Most people drag their feet on a dirt road, but I lifted my feet carefully and tried hard to preserve the natural sounds of the morning. Father did not have to try.
"Walk two steps, listen three steps," he whispered as we left the road for an old, well-traveled deer run.
The woods were wet with the May morning and the deeper we went, the more my feet turned into heavy weights, anchors I could not manage in the dense underbrush. Father, puzzled, stopped to look back at me, his finger to his lips.
I took two steps up a gentle incline toward him and stopped to listen. A branch cracked. Perhaps we had flushed a deer. Twisting too fast to look behind me, I noisily lost my balance. With an irritated wave of his hand, Father signaled to be quiet.
My heart raced. I wanted to show my father how I could walk through the woods, stealthy and sure-footed, just the right way to find turkeys. There had been times when chickadees would land on my hand, that was how still I could be. It's the only way to hear all of the sounds: the chipmunks prattling through the leaves, the spiders spinning.
But on this day I tumbled into a tangled land composed of twigs and glue. Somehow I felt responsible for the troubles of the night before. I was not a competent hunter, but an intruder, and my mother's disappointed face blurred my vision. Tripping and stumbling, my breath came in short gasps, loud and out of control. My arms crashed into low-hung branches and I tore through the woods like a tractor, trying to find a clearing where I could stand straight and still.
Finally, I fell flat on my face, which sank deep into the swampy forest floor. The weight of bulky clothes -- the perspiration-soaked long-johns and scratchy, heavy woolens that Mother insisted I wear -- sapped my strength, rendered me motionless. I felt like I had fallen into the pond with rocks in my pockets. I was dying, drowning in the aromatic pine needles, smothering in the damp moss. Then, just as I gasped my last breath of air, I felt his bear paws under my arms, lifting me high in the air like a straw doll, and I could breathe, and I could hear Father laughing, not a small laugh but the big, wide, open-mouthed roar of an unrestricted man.
FOR NOW, IT WAS OVER. THE WHOLE EPISODE had taken less than an hour and the sun had not yet risen. We gingerly picked our way out of the woods and worked our way back down the winding road to our house. I limped along slowly, as if injured.
Father spoke first, and though I could tell he was not angry, it nettled me that he had laughed so hard. My bruised pride conflicted with his lighthearted behavior and I could feel my face waving the red flag of girlish tears.
Instantly contrite, Father said kindly, "Reeni, girl, I'm sorry. I rushed you. We'll go out again and you'll see that turkey, I promise. He's glorious!"
It was a week before we went "hunting" again. Every evening after supper, when my schoolwork was done, Father sat with me at the' kitchen table. In the light of the kerosene lamp, he taught me all he knew about wild turkeys while Mother rocked quietly nearby, knitting and listening.
"He's a tricky creature, cunning and smart," he said with respect. My father had the heart of an artist and as he spoke he drew a picture of a large, full-breasted turkey. The bird's sharp eyes seemed to follow me, blinking slowly and deliberately in the flicker of the light.
"He can shake your confidence, all right, and you need a bucketful of patience to find him." He stopped to think and chose his next words carefully. "And you need grace. You must walk delicately through the woods -- with his kind of elegance. You can do that, Reeni. You have grace in the woods, honey." He paused and looked away, embarrassed.
Well, that certainly made me feel like a ten-dollar bill, but was I surprised, after our first hunt, to hear Father say it.
By now both Mother and I realized this turkey hunt had nothing at all to do with firearms. It had become a mission, and this time I understood that our goal was not to kill the turkey but to meet, maybe even to speak with him. One evening Father ambled into the kitchen holding a box in his hand. He said it was a turkey caller. I thought he was teasing, so I laughed.
"No, no," he said, "Looky here."" He scraped a piece of slate across a hollow box with very thin wooden walls. It was about five inches long and an inch wide. The noise he made when the slate was dragged across the wood sounded, he said, like a flirting hen, calling for a tom.
"These birds are not easily fooled, you know," he told me. "The idea is to get the old boy to think we want to mate. This here device helps us to actually talk to the tom turkey, but it takes a lot of practice to make it sound like a real hen."
"The noise won't just scare him away?"
"Shouldn't. Not if we use it right and sit totally still. Also, Reeni," he said, giving me a significant look, "Don't say anything! Turkeys are afraid of unfamiliar sounds."
I took heed because, though I never did talk much, when I did have something to say, it was likely to be blurted out at exactly the wrong moment.
He practiced with the caller until it sounded like the hens I'd been hearing in the woods. With spring upon us, you could hear the wild turkeys hidden in the trees. The mating call was exotic, resonating through the woods in short staccato bursts as the birds, all anxious to mate, answered each other.
"We'll go to the same place we went last week," Father said. "A flock will travel in a circle and return to the same spot every seven days or so. I'll call for five minutes, then we have to sit quietly for ten minutes, listening. Then I'll call again." He put the caller down on the kitchen table and completed the week's lecture on the wild turkey. Mother and I sat as if in church, upright and alert.
Father stopped talking long enough to take a drink of water, and I studied his face in an effort to ascertain just exactly how important this second turkey chase was to him. I did want a close-up look of this bird that put such a sparkle in my father's eye, but my best friend Penny had invited me to spend the night at her house. She lived only two miles south on Pike Road, but had no interest in rising at dawn to trample through the woods with me and my father. Mother had already given me permission. "If you want to go," she said, "I will tell your father."
Father drained the glass of water, wiped his dripping mustache with his sleeve, and continued his enthusiastic lecture. "Come on," he said. "We've got to go outside now so I can show you how to camouflage yourself."
He hurried outside, slamming the screen door like a little boy, and any thoughts I had of postponing the turkey hunt vanished. Penny would be disappointed, but I resolved to walk down to her house with the news that, this weekend at least, I would not be spending the night with her. Molly sleepily emerged from her post under the porch and we followed my father to the big old pine tree in the front yard.
"The turkey has such good eyes that he can see us blink," Father said, and at the base of the pine he showed me how to lean against it and pull my knees all the way up to the brim of my hat. This way my face and eyes were partially covered so the turkey, if I was lucky, wouldn't notice me.
Since this was not so comfortable I asked, "Why not just hide behind the tree so he can't see you?"
"You sit with your back to the tree trunk so that you can see the gobbler before he sees you. His eyes are ten times better than yours, Reeni, and he can hear five times better! Believe me, no one can hide from a wild turkey. The best you can do is trick him."
"If another tom turkey does come in, the first boy will attack him," he continued with alacrity. "The hens will go with the winner and the loser has to find new territory." My attention must have been waning because it was unlike my father to raise his voice.
"We won't be able to speak tomorrow, Reeni. Listen to me!"
He slumped against the pine, stroking his beard the way he must have done thousands of times during his life. Molly nuzzled her needle nose deep into some nearby leaves. He waited for me to ask more questions, or at least to comment, exhibit some interest, be as excited as I was the week before.
Instead, my obstinate streak emerged, and I maintained an injured silence. Not only was my slumber party with Penny ruined, but this turkey hunt had taken on an odd and sober tone. Although Father was blind to it, Mother's resentment had not been well concealed. Her husband had never once taken her on an expedition such as this, and I felt just the slightest bit of guilt.
Father no doubt was puzzled. My lack of communication was sudden and unexplained, and we went back inside the house without another word. Like a soldier on the eve of a great land battle, I climbed the stairs to my room, resigned.
We all rose in the pearly light of dawn. The flapjacks Mother stacked on my plate held no appeal and Father ate only seven. I wore the same long johns under my heavy brown skirt and the same hard cloth coat that served every day except Sunday. I wouldn't be cold, but my high laced boots were leaky and I hoped we wouldn't walk through any streams. The air was heavy with our gravity of purpose. In some way palpable to me, a change had occurred during the seven days between the two turkey hunts. Like my father, I was not smiling when Mother held the screen door for us.
Turkeys, turkeys, turkeys, I said to myself, eyes on my father's boots in front of me. Tur-keys, tur-keys, tur-keys. I chanted the word silently, in time to our quiet march up Pike Road. Left foot, tur-key, right foot, tur-key. I began to vary the private mindsong, accenting the syllables rhythmically until soon the raucous din of my own imagination banged in my ears like many pans, one against the other.
"Remember," Father whispered, as we trudged along, "Walk two steps, listen three steps." He turned toward me and winked, and for the first time in days I relaxed.
We had been walking shoulder to elbow for a quarter of a mile up the road when Father nudged my arm and started to hoot like an owl. It was a warm deep sound, one that can make a wild turkey jealous enough to answer in his own grand gobble.
We jumped over a shallow ditch to leave the dirt road and enter the forest. The damp mid-May air tunneled deeply into my lungs, coolly caressing the dark organs of my interior. I followed Father perfectly. No twigs tangled my feet, and I ducked under the morning wet branches without a sound. Father continued hooting at irregular intervals and suddenly a short distant gobble wafted through the air.
We followed the heavily-traveled deer path to a clearing where Father pointed out the droppings and scratches on the ground. He had mentioned that acorns are turkeys' favorite food, and sure enough, I looked up to see the young leaves of an oak tree. All the signs he had painstakingly described to me were appearing as if on a map of a great treasure hunt.
Father took a seat on the ground, leaning against a softly rotting stump and motioned to me to sit across from him and to his right. I knew I should get myself comfortable because once we sat down we couldn't move again, not even to scratch our noses.
Remembering my lessons, I deliberated and chose to sit on a cushion of moss at the base of a six-bucket sugar maple. Bent into half of my height, I hoped that the turkey we heard would quickly come to our clearing in the woods.
We waited.
I hunched down in the moss and peered out of my hat into the mist. My ears hurt, I was listening so hard.
We waited.
A real owl attracted by Father's hooting landed high in the oak tree and was now noisily sending his own mysterious messages. From somewhere behind us the big bird gobbled an annoyed response to the owl. Imperceptibly, Father's hand moved to his pocket. As slowly as an earthworm, he brought out his wooden turkey caller. Three times he rapidly moved the piece of slate across the box. The sound echoed in the dense woods, eerie but effective.
Little by little, Father talked the bird closer into our sanctum. To each set of three calls -- they sounded like an energetic boy running a stick across a picket fence -- the turkey responded, approaching nearer, answering louder. Soon enough, I realized that they were talking one to another. Father was courting the wild bird in his own language. Though I was enveloped in the conversation, I couldn't gauge the turkey's location. But he was loud and he was close. Then Father said something impertinent to the tom because he left, gobbling incoherently, his voice drifting farther and farther away.
I thought it was over and started to unwind my tangled limbs but Father remained still as a stone. I froze in place, uncomfortable. In the short moment that I looked over at Father, the incredible bird decided to appear. Where he came from I do not know, but, like a phantom, the wild turkey surfaced in the center of the clearing in front of me. The blood in my veins pounded so hard and loud that I was afraid it would scare him away.
But the bird was preoccupied with the thought of a mate and paraded in a circular path with wings sweeping patterns on the muddy ground. With a flair for the dramatic, the tom stretched to his full height, perhaps three feet, and blew up his barrel chest. The long wrinkled wattle hanging at his throat was a bloody purplish-red and his satanic eyes burned a fiery amber.
I dared not look at my father. Such a vivid display unsettled me in a way that I did not understand. Though it was a brisk morning, I was sweating in my long johns.
Father explained later that the length of the black tuft of whiskers hanging from the tom's breast showed his age. This bird was in his prime; his beard showed him to be a confident three-or-four-year-old. He marched in front of us, dragging his heavy wings in circles for several minutes.
Slowly, as imperceptibly as a flower blooms, his chest expanded even fuller. He could not have grown any larger without exploding and in one undulating moment of pure passion, the wild turkey strained to display his magnificent tail feathers. Never has anyone been presented with such a fan. From deep within his throat emerged a low thunderous growl, drums rolling away in the distance. The fierce perfection made me dizzy.
My leg, hurting, involuntarily jerked hard. Pandemonium broke. As quickly as he had arrived, the turkey was gone, a running flash of huge flapping wings. I groaned in pain and sorrow, but Father, as if stung by a yellow jacket, whooped and jumped from his perch.
He danced and clapped and yahooed. He picked up a sturdy bronze feather left behind in the chaos and handed it to me with a flourish. I held it close all the way home.